In the beginning, Harlan Coben was giving directions to the Men's Room

Imagine the world of crime fiction if he had become an ambulance chaser.

Harlan Coben is one of the biggest names in crime/mystery/thriller fiction today. It wasn’t always that way. As with any writer, he struggled at the beginning and he’s never forgotten it. He recently remembered one lonely Thanksgiving weekend sitting for hours at a Walden Books store (Remember those?) hoping to sign copies of his latest novel.

No one showed up. “I learned how to look busy,” he says.

One customer came up to him asking where the Steven King novels were. Another asked directions to the men’s room. Finally, an elderly man asked if Coben was signing his own books and hung around to talk to him.

“What’s it like?” the man asked.

“It’s my dream,” Corben replied.

“Man, you’re lucky,” the man said, and walked away without buying a copy.

Contrast that with his book signing in France that went on for seven hours. That’s right. Seven hours. No one was asking him for directions to the men’s room that day.

Coben never took a creative writing course in his life. The closest he came to even taking an English course in college was a class in Shakespeare while studying political science at Amherst. The truth is, he never intended to become a writer.

“I’m self-taught. The best way to learn writing is to read,” he says.

He originally was going to enter the family travel business or worse, become a lawyer. Think of it. He could have been on a billboard near you flogging legal services and chasing ambulances instead of sitting on every bestseller list in the world.

He made the right choice.

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Rick Pullen is the author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice.

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